16-year-old Tavi Gevinson is on the cover of Bust magazine and this week's New York Times Style section. The blogger and Rookie editor talks to the former about her interest in fashion, feminist conversion experience, and college plans. The Times tagged along on Rookie's recent road trip of readings and events across the U.S., which ended last week in California.

Tavi tells Bust about how at age 12 she convinced her parents to let her skip school to line up for the Chicago launch of H&M's Comme des Garçons collection. Gevinson pleaded her case at the family dinner table. "I just said that I thought [Comme des Garçons] was really interesting and that it meant a lot to me," says Gevinson. "Because it was not about looking attractive or looking cool or looking pretty. In retrospect, that must've been really comforting to parents who had a kid in middle school, when everyone else has, like, humping parties or whatever."

Gevinson also explains why she now spends less of her time writing about fashion and attending fashion week events. It's that mean girl Anna Wintour's fault, basically:

Advertisement

"I sat next to Anna Wintour at a Band of Outsiders show, and she asked me, "When do you go to school?" I just felt like, When do your models go to school?...There wasn't any real enthusiasm coming from the people who were there for what was going on around us, even though it should have been this exciting, creative thing. I felt funny about that experience. I wanted to start writing about other things on my blog, branching out from fashion."

Never meet your idols.

Although Gevinson's ardour for fashion has cooled somewhat, and Rookie, the online magazine Gevinson founded at 15, is a general-interest site aimed at teenage girls, Gevinson still thinks a lot about clothes and their meanings. "Fashion can be used to assert your individuality and your control and power over how you perceive yourself and present yourself, and it can be a form of expression." [Bust, NYTimes]

Speaking of very young women in fashion, in the September issue of Flare
, 18-year-old cover model Lindsey Wixson
says that she thinks about her family every time she's asked to pose topless or nude:

"I want to make them proud and I try to keep it pretty modest. The fashion industry always wants something else out of you and you can decide if you want to fall into that or maintain your morals and stay true to yourself. I always think about what the people from my hometown would think of some of my shoots. I care about what my family thinks — they wouldn't want to see my boobs printed everywhere."

When she was 15, Wixson described having to ask a W stylist to let her wear a flesh-toned bra underneath a transparent blouse the magazine had chosen for her. [Fashionista]

Fashionista and the Fashion Law point out that many of the styles in Madonna's
new footwear line strongly resemble designs by Christian Louboutin
and Nowhere
. Originals are on the left, Madonna's are on the right. [Fashionista
, the Fashion Law
]
OPI
is releasing a top coat flecked with tiny pieces of 18-karat gold
leaf this fall. No word on price. [TLF
]
A Los Angeles-based artist designed this Louis Vuitton wafflemaker. [Complex
]

Want to know who makes money in fashion? A bunch of old white men, mostly. Women's Wear Daily compiled data on executive pay from various S.E.C. filings for this year's list of the most highly paid U.S. C.E.O.s in fashion and retail. JC Penney's newish C.E.O. Ron Johnson tops the list with total 2011 compensation of $53,281,505. Abercrombie & Fitch's Michael Jeffries is second with $48,069,473. Neil Cole, the president and C.E.O. of Iconix, was paid $37,424,782. Ralph Lauren was number four with $36,325,782, and Nike's Mark Parker rounded out the top five with compensation of $35,212,678. These figures are all for total compensation, which for C.E.O.'s comprises both take-home pay and stock options, which fluctuate in value depending on stock prices and when the options actually vest. But however you count it these dudes are still making mad skrill. In addition to Johnson's spot at the top of the list, JC Penney executives and former executives take up three other slots in the top 10 for a total of over $1.4 billion in compensation. Under Johnson's watch, Penney has cut more than 1,000 jobs. Reed Krakoff, the president and executive creative director of Coach (and the owner of a Calder mobile and a spheroid toilet), came in at number eight on the list with compensation of $21,188,980. [WWD]

Miuccia Prada gave an interview to Italy's La Repubblica newspaper addressing the decline of Italian apparel and accessories manufacturing and the foreign ownership of Italian luxury brands. Prada used as an example the firing of Belgian designer Raf Simons from Milan-based company Jil Sander (which Prada once owned), which preceded Simons' departure for Paris, where he now leads Christian Dior. Reports WWD:

Prada partly blamed the media, accusing the Italian press of not taking fashion seriously, considering it "frivolous," without realizing how relevant it is in terms of sales and employment. She also pointed a finger at intellectuals and left-leaning politicians, who "remain diffident toward wealth and glamour," while money, she said, can actually help "organize art, culture and fashion."

Model-slash-Transformers star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley tells British Elle magazine that she never really enjoyed modeling. "I wasn't quite tall enough either and I hated it to be honest. There was no individuality, no opportunity to be individuals. I think that people forget you're human and you just become an object. I was constantly reminded that I wasn't right wherever I went and that was difficult because I'd come from a place where it didn't matter." [Telegraph]

Congratulations to Missy Rayder, who just gave birth to her first child. The model and her boyfriend, artist Marko Velickovic, have named their son Luka. [P6]

Karlie Kloss is going to be the face of the giant Target/Neiman Marcus/designers fashion collaboration happening this holiday season. [WWD]

Fashionista has a round-up of all the 2012 September issues' ad pages. Vogue is sitting pretty with 658 ad pages, up 74% from 2011. Elle has 400 and Harper's Bazaar has 360, and each is up 51% over last year. Marie Claire has 237, an increase of 45%, and InStyle rounds out the top five with 440 pages, up 10%. Lucky is the biggest ad page-loser, with 136, down 38%. We're still going to be picking up the Lucky September issue, however — we hear that the cover profile of Eva Longoria was written by This American Life's Starlee Kine. [Fashionista]

Now that Brian Atwood is partly owned by the large apparel company Jones, the brand is planning to open its first-ever boutique. Three more are to follow in 2013, up to a total of 15 Brian Atwood stores by 2017. [WWD]

According to the Rapaport Report, the diamond industry's standard pricing guide, diamond prices are falling due to declining demand in India, where the currency is currently high, and Europe.

The group said the price for one-carat diamonds dropped 13.7 percent year-over-year in June. During the first half of 2012, prices for one-carat diamonds fell 3.6 percent, with the steepest declines occurring during the latter part of May and through June.

You know what this means, ladiez! If he really loves you, he'll buy you a 13.7% bigger rock. [WWD]

And now, a moment with Robin Givhan. Robin, how did winning a Pulitzer for your fashion criticism affect your life and career?

Probably one of the most gratifying things after winning was I got such an outpouring of support from the industry. Mostly women, because with newspapers, certainly, it's mostly been women who've covered the fashion industry, and several of them said that they were so thrilled and felt that it had elevated them in the eyes of their own newsroom because so often, fashion, even though it's a billion-dollar industry, is still seen as this kind of women's concern.